Doe_Notes

=**Note 1: What is slavery and why does it exist?**=

__Title:__ The Evolution of Slavery in America

__Example:__ I wonder if when that first slave ship landed at Jamestown Colony in Virginia in 1619 if the captain knew what he was beginning. Slavery hadn't existed in British North America before then, and while it's existence seems in retrospect largely inevitable considering the other colonies that existed in South America and the West Indies, things might have been different. If in 1793 Eli Whitney had turned out to be a terrible inventor and hadn't succeeded in making cotton a viable cash crop, maybe slavery would have died out earlier. If Americans in the thirteen original states had been content with the territory up to the Mississippi, maybe slavery would not have expanded and become an important part of the Southern economy. Maybe we wouldn't have been fighting this war...

__Content suggestions:__
 * Slavery in the 13 colonies
 * First slave ship to Virginia 1619
 * Indentured servitude vs. slavery
 * How did slavery become a racialized form of forced labor?
 * Slavery becomes hereditary based on mother's status in 1662 in Virginia
 * Etc.
 * Slavery in early America
 * Is it compatible with Revolutionary ideals?
 * Slavery and the Constitution
 * Three-Fifths Compromise in Constitutional Convention
 * Invention of Cotton Gin 1793
 * Antebellum slavery
 * Effects of westward expansion
 * Congressional compromises
 * Dred Scott Supreme Court decision (1854)
 * Slavery as part of the Southern lifestyle?
 * Opinions surrounding slavery throughout history
 * Opinions surrounding slavery throughout history

=**Note 2: What were the ideals for which the Revolutionary War was fought?**=

__Title:__ "All men are created equal"?

__Example:__ As the country is torn apart I can't help but wonder what it is all for. Why is brother fighting brother yet again? Can anything be worth so much bloodshed? What could be so fundamentally important as to tear a country apart? And then my thoughts return to the Founding Fathers and their conviction that separation from England was the only choice. Thomas Jefferson wrote words that resonate with every American: "we hold these truths to be self evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their creator with certain unalienable rights that among these are the right to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness."

__Content suggestions and questions to consider:__
 * Are ideals worth fighting for?
 * Is it possible to fight for only ideals or do other considerations (economic, political...) always matter as well?
 * Who wanted to separate from Great Britain? Were their reasons all the same?
 * What leads someone to choose war?
 * Can war always be avoided?
 * Class divisions before and during war
 * Contradiction of Declaration of Independence/Constitution and slavery
 * Controversies in Constitutional Convention

=**Note 3: Write about THREE instances of resistance to slavery that you have read/heard about.**=

__Title:__ Haitian Influence on Slave Uprisings in the Deep South

__Example:__

__Content suggestions and questions to consider:__
 * Everyday resistance
 * Runaways
 * Maroons
 * Underground Railroad
 * Sojourner Truth
 * William Still
 * Henry 'Box' Brown
 * Frederick Douglass
 * Harriet Tubman
 * Abolitionists
 * Quakers
 * Pennsylvania Antislavery Society
 * Massachusetts Antislavery Society
 * Violent resistance
 * New York City
 * Cato, NC
 * Gabriel Prosser (1800)
 * Denmark Vesey (1822)
 * Nat Turner (1831)
 * Chrastiana Riots (184)
 * Haitian Revolt (1791-1804)
 * Toussaint L'Ouverture
 * Influence on British North America

=**Note 4: Write about one or two African Americans that you have head speak or whose speeches you have read in the newspapers.**=

__Title:__ The Real Meaning of the Fourth of July?

__Example:__

__Content suggestions and questions to consider:__
 * David Walker's Appeal
 * "Ain't I a Woman" (Speech by Sojourner Truth)
 * "What to the Slave is the Fourth of July?" (Frederick Douglass on 4th of July, 1852): click here
 * Articles from //The North Star// (Frederick Douglass' newspaper)
 * Articles from //The Liberator// (William Lloyd Garrison's newspaper)

=**Note 5: Reflect on the Civil War; where is the country headed in 1865?**=

__Title:__ The Reconstruction of "A House Divided"

__Example:__

The war, the terrible war, is over. Georgia was razed to the ground by General Sherman, over four million blacks were freed and with their emancipation a "peculiar institution" has ended. It is time to rebuild and to mend but it will certainly not be easy. This has been a bloody war with over 600,000 deaths.........

C__ontent suggestions and questions to consider:__
 * How the war was fought (ex. total war in Atlanta)
 * How will the country rebuild? (You could employ some "predictive" powers and research what actual Reconstruction looked like)
 * What will happen with the emancipated slaves? What are the implications of the 13th Amendment?